With silly season at its end and every party claiming to be the summer’s last, it does feel like we’ve reached the sauna, sober October, “no one invite me out until 2027” zone. For those still shaking arse, I apologise: I’m two-stepped out. The mind is willing but the two-step is weak.
And yet, in that willing mind, I keep returning to one party. Specifically, Saturday night in Field Maneuvers’ new Function Room: dykes, a Drysu messiah, dancefloor sweat and the particular kind of beautiful commitment to the silly bit that is the euphoric heart of a Field Maneuvers crowd. Pickled eggs on stage, a whole crew clad in jockey fits, horse heads and a ‘ladbrokes’ bookie, or the crew of swimwear clad ‘synchronized rimmers’ to name a few.
After a massive debut on the site in 2025 taking over the pub for what was described as the year’s “most unruly moment”, artists Ali Wagner and Lucy Nurnberg, the duo behind UHaul Dyke Rescue, were invited back to Field Maneuvers’ utopian playground. This time, they were given the beloved Packet Inn to redesign, alongside a new space: the Function Room, a massive dancefloor inspired by the intimate, wooden-walled world of working men’s clubs. Think fruit machines, smelling your drink before you’ve bought it, and the landlady closing the curtains so you can stay past closing time. Providing ample space for dancing, a chill place to regroup with your mates, gossip (and obviously flirt) while sheltering from the rain.
“The Packet Inn draws on old-school boozer culture, but filtered through our own dream of one day opening a pub. We used to joke we’d call it the Dyke of York,” Wagner told me when we caught up post-fest.
Despite having been sprung into life in a matter of days in the middle of a field, the pub had that uncanny beloved local feel. There were comfy seats worn into the shape of the bodies that had already occupied them; paintings of ships and British hills; Princess Diana plates; references to Coronation Street and the Old Vic; gilded pictures of drag queens. Elsewhere, ACAB scarves and a huge 1970s union-style banner made by Loz Corelli that read ‘TOGETHER WE DANCE / DIVIDED WE FALL’. Glasweigan artist Trackie McLeod also joined the family affair, contributing posters around the pub and the star of the show lightbox in the function room that read, ‘TELL YOUR MATES YOU LOVE THEM’.
That accumulation is important, Wagner and Nurnberg used mostly found materials. The materials used across the installations were gathered through call outs to community and scavenging: from friends in London, Facebook Marketplace in Germany, and the gutting of a beloved old pub in Wales. It speaks to the ethos of Field Maneuvers, that the pub that once existed somewhere in Wales could continue, in fragments, in a field full of queer ravers. A plate, a chair, a picture, a curtain: each brought its own associations with it. Wagner and Nurnberg had placed these things together so that they could start speaking to one another again.
If the Packet Inn was about the pub as social infrastructure, the Function Room was about the dancefloor as one. Wagner shared that,
“Above all, we wanted it to be a place for meeting new friends and locking in on chats with your mates. What we didn’t expect, but loved, was watching strangers end up in dart tournaments in the early hours of the morning. Even after the taps had closed, the pub stayed alive with people who just didn’t want to leave. That’s exactly the energy we were hoping for.”
One of the most striking reflections of this that I observed was a question I overheard at the U-Haul arm-wrestling: “So, who’s your surgeon?”
There are forms of queer knowledge that circulate through spaces like this: knowledge about bodies, identities, friendships, histories, sex, nightlife, transition, taste and where you can get an exceptional boob job. Sometimes the knowledge is explicit; sometimes it is simply the recognition that you are in a space where you can ask.
You can’t force that kind of intimacy into existence. But you can create the conditions that make it possible.That’s the more interesting function of Wagner and Nurnberg’s work. They don’t manufacture community. They build somewhere for the community to happen.
The goings on in the Function Room and elsewhere at the festival are prime examples of this. The B2B DJ multi-tool takeover from UHaul Dyke Rescue, go-go dancers recreating The Last Supper behind Drysu, and FAFF‘s new live set all turned the Function Room into something different. The return of the UHaul truck brought its own familiar chaos, inviting friends, exes and soon-to-be lovers to arm wrestle for glory or get down and flirty in the sock-wrestling arena. It is the spirit of the festival, who elsewhere invited Ed Curtis to redesign the Ambient stage, which became adorned in his classic colourful stretched patterns, like lying beneath a quilt.
On Friday, the weather nearly had the final word. The kind of rain that turns festival optimism into a logistical question: is my tent still there? Are my socks salvageable? Why am I doing this? But this quickly became the duo’s favourite moment of the festival, they commented,
“Friday afternoon into early evening, when it was absolutely bucketing down with rain, really stands out to me. The pub turned into a proper refuge, packed wall to wall with the festival’s early comers (who had just set their tents up in the pouring rain), all just sitting, drinking pints, and talking. It was before the Function Room’s programming had even kicked off for the day, but we’d scheduled Uhaul Dyke Rescue’s arm wrestling to happen right then, and it got properly, gloriously gritty. The space held all of that at once: shelter from the storm and the start of something a bit chaotic.”
This is where installation stops being an object and starts becoming an experience.
There is something increasingly strange about the spaces in which we are expected to have a good time.
Across nightlife and festival culture, there has been a move towards enormous, industrial spaces: vast hangars, enormous sound systems, massive capacities. The scale can be exhilarating. There is a particular pleasure in disappearing into something much bigger than yourself. But there is another kind of pleasure in being somewhere that feels like it belongs to you.
Field Maneuvers feels in many ways like the beloved cornershop of festivals. The person behind the till can call you darling and it isn’t annoying. You know where the tinnies are, the posh crisps. It’s familiar and a world unto itself. Someone’s weird portrait of an old geezer can sit beside an ACAB scarf, a picture of someone’s poodle and a Princess Diana plate, and nobody needs to explain why.
The Function Room offered a dancefloor that felt like that: not necessarily sophisticated, but deeply specific.
This isn’t an argument against the industrial dancefloor. Everyone needs a Berlin moment. Sometimes you want to escape into something completely outside your everyday life. But there is a difference between escape and estrangement. The Function Room offered euphoria without demanding that you detach yourself from the people and cultural histories that made the euphoria possible.
And this raises a bigger question about installation art itself.
Where is installation actually possible outside institutions?
Rent is high. Space is premium. Complicated, collaborative mediums that exist partly so that other things can happen within them don’t always fit neatly into funding categories. A work whose success depends on people staying late, dancing, drinking, flirting or making a mess is particularly difficult to square with the language of the cultural economy.
Yet these are precisely the spaces in which culture gets made.
There is something hopeful in that at a moment when cultural space is increasingly difficult to come by. If the installation can be a form of social infrastructure, then festivals like Field Maneuvers offer a rare opportunity to test just what that infrastructure can do.
The decor will eventually be dismantled. The curtains will come down. The chairs will go somewhere else. The UHaul truck will drive away.
But that isn’t necessarily the end of the work. Someone will remember sheltering in the Packet Inn during the momentary floods of Friday night. Someone will remember watching someone go-go on a fruit machine like it was a dance pole in the Function Room. Someone will remember the question they were asked, or the answer they gave.
For one weekend, in a field, Wagner and Nurnberg built a pub and a dancefloor. Field Maneuvers gave them the space to do it. And everyone else got to find out what could happen there.
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Words: MK McGrath
Photographer: Celine Antal, Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin, Dani d’Ingeo
Published on September 18th, 2026